When comparing git-cola vs SmartGit, the Slant community recommends SmartGit for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for Windows?”SmartGit is ranked 1st while git-cola is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose SmartGit is:

SmartGit can be used free of charge by Open Source developers, teachers and their students, or for hobby, non-paid usage.

Pros

Pro

Free software

This application is FOSS, and thus it can be freely modified & distributed.

Pro

Cross-platform

Works on Linux, Mac and Windows.

Pro

Full unicode support

Pro

Minimalist interface

Pro

Available in Homebrew

Can be easily installed through homebrew by running brew install git-cola.

Pro

Free for non-commercial use

SmartGit can be used free of charge by Open Source developers, teachers and their students, or for hobby, non-paid usage.

Pro

Easy to use

The clean and intuitive UI makes SmartGit very easy even for people with no prior experience with Git, even after reading just a bit on how Git works and what the main commands are.

Pro

Uncluttered UI

SmartGit has a rather clean and uncluttered user interface. All the most useful tools and information are displayed at all times or are otherwise just a couple of clicks away.

All repositories are displayed in the sidebar and through a tabbed interface you can view various info about a specific repository (files, branches, branch graph, etc). The most used git commands like pull, push, sync, commit and merge are always available on top.

Pro

Great overview of the project/repository's log

SmartGit's log viewer displays the full commit history in a clean UI. This can be filtered to only show commits matching a certain criterion (e.g. branch).

Pro

Supports GitFlow

GitFlow provides a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects. SmartGit allows for setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model.

Pro

Smart embedded difference viewer

When the changes affect only a few characters in a line of code, the embedded difference viewers in the majority of competitors (such as SourceTree) show the whole line as removed and re-added. SmartGit highlights the characters that have been removed / added, so they are easier to read.

Pro

Supports Mercurial & SVN

Apart from Git, SmartGit supports both Mercurial and SVN via a git bridge.

Pro

Has the most features and most logical layout

Compared to gitk, git gui, SourceTree, GitKraken.

Pro

Auto-detects repositories on disk

You don't have to search all the repositories when trying out SmartGit the 1st time, but it finds all of them magically.

Pro

Portable version for Windows is available

SmartGit also has a portable bundle that can be downloaded and can be run from external devices (such as a flash drive for example) or to test-drive without leaving traces on the machine after removing.

Pro

Can be integrated with Github, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Atlassian Stash

Using OAuth, you can connect SmartGit with your accounts in Github, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Stash and access the remote repositories there. You can then clone, fork, commit or push to your remote repositories from inside SmartGit. You can also view and manage pull requests for your open source projects from SmartGit.

Pro

Auto stash

If normal Git commands would abort because of local modifications, SmartGit can stash them and apply later after the command ran successfully, e.g. a rebase.

Pro

Extendable with external tools

External tools (which have a command line support) can be integrated to be used to open/view files, for diff or as conflict solvers. E.g. editors like Notepad++ or VS Code, p4merge to diff images or kdiff3 as diff view/conflict solver.

Pro

Syntax coloring for many languages

The built-in compare and conflict solver has syntax coloring with customizable colors.

Pro

Every git command is available through the GUI

Not every, but nearly all.

Pro

Best submodule workflow on the market

You can easily update submodules from the containing repo, unlike other GUIs that require you to open each repo separately. Saves a lot of time when working on a monorepo managed using submodules.

Pro

Great filtering options

The file list view can be tweaked and filtered in many ways (e.g. regex can be used).

Pro

Log with fine-grained display of branches

There is no option of just showing the current branch or all branches, but you can select very fine-grained what branches/forks should be displayed.

Pro

Can rearrange Repository window and Log window views/panels

This allows great layouts as desired.

Pro

Allows rearranging views

If screen space is limited, one can stack some views onto another. 2 layouts are available - "Main" and "Review" - with independent view positions.

Pro

Great support

Support responds quickly and they genuinely try to help you! If it's a bug, it will often be fixed within days.

Pro

Log: ability to see dangling commits and stash commits

Rebased, but not yet garbage-collected commits can be easily made accessible again, e.g. after a reset hard.

Pro

The best multi-repository support

Can make a repo group containing multiple repos; it acts as a meta repo.

Can submit selected files from multiple repos in a repo group in one commit action; uses the same commit message in all the repo commits.

Pro

GPG support

GPG in SmartGit makes for added security.

Pro

Journal dedicated for current branch history

Showing commits from the current branch, its remote branch and one auxiliary branch. Independent of the that, there is a log window available that allows to view all (other) commits.

Pro

Can edit file in workspace or index directly from the compare view

This is very useful when reviewing files before committing and finding a needed quick tweak.

Evolution submission program

Pro

Can detect issue numbers and links to the issue tracker

Pro

Supports selecting open issues from JIRA

Allows you to select the desired issue, instead of having to do it manually.

Pro

Offers life-time updates

One payment, get updates for all future versions.

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Cons

Con

Limited feature set

You sometimes need to touch the terminal in order to get certain things done.

Con

Proprietary license

Not an open source license.

Con

Diff display doesn't show long lines well

If changes are made in very long lines, the diff display is hard to navigate.

Con

Currently lacks support for git subtree

It's a useful feature when developing several independent project modules in parallel.

Con

Absolute git beginners will find it very complicated

Con

Unintuitive UI

At first glance, the sub windows are poorly organized. For example, there isn't an easy way to navigate the files in the repository. It's drastically differently designed than other popular source control clients.

Con

Some git functionality has been renamed

In order to preserve the same interface across Git and Mercurial, some naming compromises have been made so that the various VCS it supports are all consistent with each other.

Con

It can be slow and resource hungry

It was written in Java, which is known for being a resource hog, and it can be slow on some machines, as well as prone to errors if developers are not very experienced.

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